4,522 research outputs found

    Charge ordering of magnetic monopoles in triangular spin ice patterns

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    Artificial spin ice offers the possibility to investigate a variety of dipolar orderings, spin frustrations and ground states. However, the most fascinating aspect is the realization that magnetic charge order can be established without spin order. We have investigated magnetic dipoles arranged on a honeycomb lattice as a function of applied field, using magnetic force microscopy. For the easy direction with the field parallel to one of the three dipole sublattices we observe at coercivity a maximum of spin frustration and simultaneously a maximum of charge order of magnetic monopoles with alternating charges ±\pm 3.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

    Magnetic domain fluctuations in an antiferromagnetic film observed with coherent resonant soft x-ray scattering

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    We report the direct observation of slow fluctuations of helical antiferromagnetic domains in an ultra-thin holmium film using coherent resonant magnetic x-ray scattering. We observe a gradual increase of the fluctuations in the speckle pattern with increasing temperature, while at the same time a static contribution to the speckle pattern remains. This finding indicates that domain-wall fluctuations occur over a large range of time scales. We ascribe this non-ergodic behavior to the strong dependence of the fluctuation rate on the local thickness of the film.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

    Proximity effect of vanadium on spin-density-wave magnetism in Cr films

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    The spin-density wave (SDW) state in thin chromium films is well known to be strongly affected by proximity effects from neighboring layers. To date the main attention has been given to effects arising from exchange interactions at interfaces. In the present work we report on combined neutron and synchrotron scattering studies of proximity effects in Cr/V films where the boundary condition is due to the hybridization of Cr with paramagnetic V at the interface. We find that the V/Cr interface has a strong and long-range effect on the polarization, period, and the N\'{e}el temperature of the SDW in rather thick Cr films. This unusually strong effect is unexpected and not predicted by theory.Comment: 7 figure

    Extended Source Diffraction Effects Near Gravitational Lens Fold Caustics

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    Calculations are presented detailing the gravitational lens diffraction due to the steep brightness gradient of the limb of a stellar source. The lensing case studied is the fold caustic crossing. The limb diffraction signal greatly exceeds that due to the disk as a whole and should be detectable for white dwarf sources in our Galaxy and it's satellites with existing telescopes. Detection of this diffraction signal would provide an additional mathematical constraint, reducing the degeneracy among models of the lensing geometry. The diffraction pattern provides pico-arcsecond resolution of the limb profile.Comment: 19 pages including 17 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ, Minor conceptual change from previous versio

    Active promoters give rise to false positive 'Phantom Peaks' in ChIP-seq experiments

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    Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is widely used to identify chromosomal binding sites. Chromatin proteins are cross-linked to their target sequences in living cells. The purified chromatin is sheared and the relevant protein is enriched by immunoprecipitation with specific antibodies. The co-purifying genomic DNA is then determined by massive parallel sequencing (ChIP-seq). We applied ChIP-seq to map the chromosomal binding sites for two ISWI-containing nucleosome remodeling factors, ACF and RSF, in Drosophila embryos. Employing several polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies directed against their signature subunits, ACF1 and RSF-1, robust profiles were obtained indicating that both remodelers co-occupied a large set of active promoters. Further validation included controls using chromatin of mutant embryos that do not express ACF1 or RSF-1. Surprisingly, the ChIP-seq profiles were unchanged, suggesting that they were not due to specific immunoprecipitation. Conservative analysis lists about 3000 chromosomal loci, mostly active promoters that are prone to non-specific enrichment in ChIP and appear as 'Phantom Peaks'. These peaks are not obtained with pre-immune serum and are not prominent in input chromatin. Mining the modENCODE ChIP-seq profiles identifies potential Phantom Peaks in many profiles of epigenetic regulators. These profiles and other ChIP-seq data featuring prominent Phantom Peaks must be validated with chromatin from cells in which the protein of interest has been depleted

    The Teddy tool v1.1: temporal disaggregation of daily climate model data for climate impact analysis

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    Climate models provide the required input data for global or regional climate impact analysis in temporally aggregated form, often in daily resolution to save space on data servers. Today, many impact models work with daily data; however, sub-daily climate information is becoming increasingly important for more and more models from different sectors, such as the agricultural, water, and energy sectors. Therefore, the open-source Teddy tool (temporal disaggregation of daily climate model data) has been developed to disaggregate (temporally downscale) daily climate data to sub-daily hourly values. Here, we describe and validate the temporal disaggregation, which is based on the choice of daily climate analogues. In this study, we apply the Teddy tool to disaggregate bias-corrected climate model data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). We choose to disaggregate temperature, precipitation, humidity, longwave radiation, shortwave radiation, surface pressure, and wind speed. As a reference, globally available bias-corrected hourly reanalysis WFDE5 (WATCH Forcing Data methodology applied to ERA5) data from 1980–2019 are used to take specific local and seasonal features of the empirical diurnal profiles into account. For a given location and day within the climate model data, the Teddy tool screens the reference data set to find the most similar meteorological day based on rank statistics. The diurnal profile of the reference data is then applied on the climate model. The physical dependency between variables is preserved, since the diurnal profile of all variables is taken from the same, most similar meteorological day of the historical reanalysis dataset. Mass and energy are strictly preserved by the Teddy tool to exactly reproduce the daily values from the climate models. For evaluation, we aggregate the hourly WFDE5 data to daily values and apply the Teddy tool for disaggregation. Thereby, we compare the original hourly data with the data disaggregated by Teddy. We perform a sensitivity analysis of different time window sizes used for finding the most similar meteorological day in the past. In addition, we perform a cross-validation and autocorrelation analysis for 30 globally distributed samples around the world that represent different climate zones. The validation shows that Teddy is able to reproduce historical diurnal courses with high correlations &gt;0.9 for all variables, except for wind speed (&gt;0.75) and precipitation (&gt;0.5). We discuss the limitations of the method regarding the reproduction of precipitation extremes, interday connectivity, and disaggregation of end-of-century projections with strong warming. Depending on the use case, sub-daily data provided by the Teddy tool could make climate impact assessments more robust and reliable.</p

    The SHAP Microarchitecture and Java Virtual Machine

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    This report presents the SHAP platform consisting of its microarchitecture and its implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Like quite a few other embedded implementations of the Java platform, the SHAP microarchitecture relies on an instruction set architecture based on Java bytecode. Unlike them, it, however, features a design with well-encapsulated components autonomously managing their duties on rather high abstraction levels. Thus, permanent runtime duties are transferred from the central computing core to concurrently working components so that it can actually spent a larger fraction of time executing application code. The degree of parallelity between the application and the runtime implementation is increased. Currently, the stack and heap management including the automatic garbage collection are implemented this way. After detailing the design of the microarchitecture, the SHAP implementation of the Java Virtual Machine is described. A major focus is laid on the presentation of the layout and the use of the runtime data structures representing the various language abstractions provided by Java. Also, the boot sequence starting the JVM is described

    Growth modes of nanoparticle superlattice thin films

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    We report about the fabrication and characterization of iron oxide nanoparticle thin film superlattices. The formation into different film morphologies is controlled by tuning the particle plus solvent-to-substrate interaction. It turns out that the wetting vs. dewetting properties of the solvent before the self-assembly process during solvent evaporation plays a major role to determine the resulting film morphology. In addition to layerwise growth also three-dimensional mesocrystalline growth is evidenced. The understanding of the mechanisms ruling nanoparticle self-assembly represents an important step toward the fabrication of novel materials with tailored optical, magnetic or electrical transport properties
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